It's official: the Virginia defense facility run -- on taxpayer dollars -- by one of the central felons in the Duke Cunningham scandal is closing Monday.

The news comes just days after the Pentagon announced it would not renew the contract for the Martinsville-based Foreign Supplier Assessment Center, which was created and sustained largely through earmarks from Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA). Goode received over $90,000 in contributions from Mitchell Wade, who's spilling his guts to federal investigators in an attempt to dodge jail time.

Who's it bad news for? Just about everyone involved. Goode's getting slammed for bringing MZM to town, winning the company unusually generous financial perks and sending the bill to the city. "Rep. Goode forgot whom he should represent when he brokered a deal favorable to campaign contributors at the risk of his district," the Roanoke (Va.) Times opined Saturday.

It's bad news for MZM -- now Athena Innovative Solutions. Sources tell me this is not the only one of their contracts getting cut. The Pentagon trimmed more than 30 positions from an Athena contract to provide employees to the Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA), according to two former MZM employees who are in touch with current Athena staffers.

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It has been nearly five months since Justice Department prosecutors working the Duke Cunningham corruption case first requested information from three key House committees. To date, they haven't got a scrap of paper in return, nor a single interview with a staffer, Roll Call's John Bresnahan reports today.

In May, if you recall, anonymous Hill denizens whined to the media that if they really tried to comply, Congress would "shut down."

DoJ wants information stretching back to 1997, and requests that broad could lead them to knock on many new doors. Independent reports have already confirmed that as offshoots of the Cunningham probe, the DoJ is looking into Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Ken Calvert (R-CA), Katherine Harris (R-FL), and possibly others, as well as former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) -- and, of course, Cunningham himself.

What would ten years of records and information about a corrupt congressman uncover? Apparently, that's for Congress to know, and the rest of America to wonder about -- for a while. Congress' August recess is coming up, which provides another reason for them to do nothing. Will Justice let them get away with it?

Last week we learned the Feds have hit up Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL) for information about her dealings with Mitchell Wade, the fraudster who's confessed to giving fraudulent "straw" donations to Harris, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA), and a third lawmaker: Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA).

Bad news hit Goode's re-election campaign this weekend, when an employee of Wade's old company, MZM, pleaded guilty to making fraudulent contributions to Goode's campaign, and agreed to cooperate with investigators. To date, Justice has stated only that they do not have any indication Goode was aware the donations were fake. But the plea deal from senior MZM exec Richard Berglund raises the question: what if he knows something?

Duke's in jail, of course; and Harris is clearly an object of scrutiny for the Feds. But Goode, who took something close to $90,000 from Wade and other employees of his company, MZM -- and helped win them a sweet deal for a Defense Department facility in Goode's district -- insists the Feds have yet to reach his doorstep.

"He has not been" contacted by the DoJ, Goode spokesman Linwood Duncan told me this morning. That's about as flat a denial as one could ask for. Duncan had been more shaded in his comments to reporters this weekend, saying only that "as far as I know, nothing has changed" since March, when Goode had that he hadn't been contacted by investigators.

Last November, House intelligence committee chairman Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) vowed a probe into how former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) abused the classified budget process to hide secret earmarks for companies who bribed him.

Senate counsel Michael Stern was loaned to the committee to lead the process -- and the whole affair was plunged into darkness. No public report or hearing has been promised, and no end date was ever given. (Back in March, Hoekstra insisted the report would be completed within "weeks.")

Tonight, AP reports that Stern has briefed the committee on his findings, a likely sign his work is wrapping up. Hoekstra told AP that the investigator wants to interview Cunningham himself, as "a final step." Justice Department lawyers are resisting, fearing trouble for ongoing investigations into the Cunningham matter. Hoekstra is threatening to use his subpoena power to overrule their objections.

Will Stern get a climactic face-to-face with the Duke? What will he learn? And will the public ever learn the results of the probe?

AP reports:

WASHINGTON — An ex-employee at a defense contractor pleaded guilty Friday to making illegal donations to the campaign of Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., marking the latest chapter in a congressional bribery probe.

Richard Berglund, who formerly supervised the Martinsville, Va., office of MZM Inc., faces up to a year in prison for engaging in a scheme with company owner Mitchell Wade to reimburse MZM employees for campaign donations. The scheme violates the Federal Election Campaign Act.

In February, Wade pleaded guilty to bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, in exchange for help in getting $150 million in Defense Department contracts.

What's up with the federal investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)? I chatted with Jerry Kammer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Copley News Service, whose work scrutinized Lewis' dealings even before the probe was publicly known. He counseled patience and a long view. These things, he says, take time:

"I think when the investigators started on this stuff, they had to climb the learning curve, just like we've had to. When I wrote for The Arizona Republic, I got to know some of the people who worked on the Charles Keating task force -- he was the symbolic central figure of the S&L scandal. It took them a while to get started, but once they got a head of steam they made a lot of progress.

"I'd never looked at a lobbying disclosure form or an appropriations conference report until last summer. I'd been writing about immigration. . . I would bet that the agents they brought in on this case had a similar learning process to undergo. They'd probably never pulled any of these documents before.

"As a matter of fact, I've wondered how they train the agents for a case like this. These are complicated investigations. They have to be able to take something to a jury against a very well-paid defense lawyer. I wouldn't be surprised to see the investigation take six months or a year until we see any concrete results. And, of course, they might decide that they don't have a case.

"[Reporters] can write about behavior that we think is questionable. That's our standard. But [federal prosecutors] have to decide if that behavior violates a criminal statute. And in Washington, there are a lot of people who will tell you that the systemic scandal lies in what Congress allows to be legal.

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Buried in this new Business Week article by Eamon Javers and Dawn Kopecki is a startling revelation: MZM Inc., the company once owned by admitted felon Mitchell Wade, worked on assessing Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities during the runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"[B]efore the invasion of Iraq," the duo writes, "[MZM's business] included helping with [the] controversial analysis of Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities."

Wade, of course, has confessed to bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) with over a million dollars in money, gifts and favors.

Others, including Warandpiece.com's Laura Rozen, have long suspected Wade's MZM to have played a role in throwing the calls on Saddam's nuclear programs. It's been known for some time that MZM provided contract employees to the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), which handled much of the Pentagon's pre-war WMD analysis. But Javers and Kopecki are the first to report that those MZMers were involved in the center's (mis)interpretation of the pre-war Iraq nuke intel.

The two note that while the White House's WMD Commission directed heavy criticism at the NGIC for "misscharacterizing" Saddam's nuclear program, it didn't fault MZM directly. (Of course, as we reported earlier, MZM had at least three staffers on the commission's staff.)

While the White House's own panel didn't fault MZM, an earlier Senate study had found that an unnamed contractor was directly involved in blowing the nuke call. See Rozen's post from last December for details.

There's a kicker to all this, of course. Despite having a hand in one of the biggest intelligence failures in recent history, folks in the intel community seem to think MZM has just done great work for them. Before the company was bought last August, the new owner, Veritas, hired former CIA General Counsel Jeffrey Smith to do due diligence on MZM, and according to his interviews, MZM did top-shelf work. "Smith. . . reported back that the half-dozen intelligence agencies he approached thought highly of MZM."

It's a piece well worth reading.

Update: Rozen has more details about NGIC and WMD intelligence.

Well, maybe not exactly. But they screwed up a field trip to Gettysburg for some of the Pentagon's leaders-in-training last year.

Surely you recall Shirlington Limo -- the company, run by an ex-con, who allegedly ferried former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) and prostitutes to parties and trysts at D.C.'s Watergate hotel and elsewhere.

In 2004, Cunningham wrote the company a letter of recommendation to the Homeland Security Department, and the company later won curious multi-million-dollar contracts to transport the agency's top officials and staff in limos and shuttle buses.

Now, it turns out they had contracts with the Pentagon, too. At least, with a tendril of it: the National Defense University. (Thanks to TPMm Reader CP for the tip.)

Dave Thomas -- not the deceased founder of Wendy's, but a spokesman for NDU, which educates military leadership -- confirmed that two colleges within the university hired Shirlington Limo. And boy, did they learn their lesson.

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Vanity Fair's lengthy takeout on the Duke Cunningham scandal reminded me of why I find it so engrossing: the details.

And what colorful details the magazine serves up: There's Duke on the phone, just days before pleading guilty, desperately cajoling his antiques dealer to hide some of his furniture so the feds won't find it. And there's former top CIA official Dusty Foggo, flashing his agency credentials to the strip club bouncer, before taking a seat in front of the stage and talking about his sexual preferences all night.

And there's admitted Duke briber Mitchell Wade, strolling through his office. "Where's your Rolls-Royce?" an aide asks him Oh, Wade answers breezily, Cunningham's got it today, it's parked in the congressional parking lot.

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Vanity Fair weighs in on the slow-emerging D.C. saga: Duke Cunningham was a bad father, Brent Wilkes got congressmen laid in Honduras, Dusty Foggo is a dirty, dirty man, and Mitchell Wade is an evil genius.

Is former top intelligence official James King under pressure from federal prosecutors?

If not, it looks like he should be. As we reported several weeks ago, King -- the former head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency -- twice aided the bribery schemes of Mitchell Wade, making $12,000 in illegal campaign donations to help Wade buy favors from lawmakers.

At the time, King was a top executive at Wade's defense contracting firm, MZM. He took over the company, which is now named Athena Innovative Solutions, after Wade's felonies became public.

King could be a dangerous fellow to go down -- for many folks. He was a trusted aide to Michael V. Hayden, former NSA chief and now head of the CIA, who employed him as a contractor from MZM. While at MZM, King also played a key role in developing the Pentagon's troubled domestic spying operation, CIFA. And as a senior MZM executive, he was likely a witness to many of Wade's hijinks.

As the Washington Post reported Friday, Feds have convinced another MZM executive, Richard Berglund, to plead guilty to making the same kind of fraudulent donations. (Check out our guest-blogging TPM Reader DK's thoughts on this.)

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